# TWK: Able's Prose Style *The Urth list — 3 messages, 2 voices, 04 Nov 2005* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Mike Sakasegawa *04 Nov 2005, 23:25* Hello all. I'm relatively new to the list--I posted briefly as Hitsuji a couple of years ago and then dropped out. Anyway, I recently finished reading The Wizard and had a question. As far as I noticed, Arthur never once uses a contraction in the prose portions of his letter to Ben. It seemed odd to me, because his dialogue uses as many contractions as you would normally see in a 20th century American teenager's speech, but I was unable to spot a single instance of a contraction in the prose. I was wondering if anyone thought there was any significance to that. -Mike --- ### Bob Miller *06 Nov 2005, 02:42 · in reply to Mike Sakasegawa* An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20051105/2cefe6ff/attachment.htm --- ### Mike Sakasegawa *06 Nov 2005, 19:43 · in reply to Bob Miller* Contractions are a perfectly legitimate grammatical construction, and given the first person perspective and the characterization evident in the narration, it struck me as odd that there were no contractions to be found. Since it stood out to me so much in TWK, I feel like I would have noticed if they had also been absent from the other Wolfe works that I've read, but I don't recall that being the case. I'll investigate further when I get the chance. -Mike > On 11/5/05, Bob Miller wrote: > > That comment about the lack of contractions is probably apropos now, MIke. All it really means is that GEne Wolfe is not an incompetent writer or does not deliberately use bad grammar. I well remember being dropped from an A to a C in an inclass essay because I used a couple contractions. My ego still smarts from the ruler to it. > > Bob ---